Alan, Looking forward to future Sony consumer robotics. Maybe we will be surprised? Thanks for sharing. Steve S

After the way they dropped AIBO, no ongoing spare parts, no nothing, I don't trust Sony to maintain anything. They just left customers who laid out the hundreds of dollars to buy one twisting in the wind. Even if I bought a new product specifically to convert it to EZB, there would always be the issue of spare mechanical parts. In the future, if they drop something again, they should at least put out the files for the various parts so as to allow people with 3-D printers to make their own. Chances are slim to none that they would though.

i like sony.they make very good ,need stuff.to bad they stopped. i hear there was a dis agreement by the top manament how the sony qurio, chould look like.

I actually saw a really sweet documentary about some guy how devoted himself to fix those broken AIBOs for their poor owners....of course he is salvaging the remains of those where the owners did not care, but it is really interesting to see how attached especially older japanese people got to those robot dogs!

Yeah, AIBO was way ahead of its time, and in Japan, a lot of people live in small apartments and can't keeps real pets, as well as having some culteral norms that make it easy to ascribe personality to inanimate objects. It is a shame the AIBO was so fragile, particularly the neck, and that Sony ran into financial difficulties and stopped supporting them.

Alan

on discovery channel is a docu ,japanese famely who makes all aibo's from people. they have so much work they can make a living on it.

Watched a show called DW-TV Tomorrow Today on ETV and they had a segment on the AIBO and the relationship the Japanese people have with them. Specifically the elderly. As Alan said, it's a cultural thing. Even religious. Their religion says everything has a spirit. So they truly believe there is some spark in these robots. They even showed a religious service to send off "departed" beloved robot dogs of various brands for recycling (using the parts to repair others). In this way they believed their unit would live on in some other cherished robot pet. Not unlike how people believe donated organs mean their loved one is, in some small way, still alive.

The story centered on an AIBO which belonged to an elderly woman. She was very attached to it. She sent it off to be repaired by some people who do that using salvaged parts. Of course she was thrilled when it came back in working order. I suspect the company making the program footed the bill. Probably why she had not sent it off before then. They briefly showed the people repairing it, so they may have hand carried it to them and back.

I'm surprised no one has already scanned all the most needed parts for printing.